Annie Proulx - Barkskins

Where to begin? Perhaps it was best to make a catalog of tree species. Two weeks of this and he realized it was beyond him. There were simply too many kinds of trees. He did not know them, could only observe their habits. He followed rubber tappers’ paths, poor men in lifelong debt servitude, no better than slaves. He pitied them but it was not until he followed a smell into a small clearing and found a charred corpse that he could believe the ghastly rumor of punishment of those who tried to break free from the system; they were caught, wrapped around with ropes of flammable latex and set on fire. The forest encouraged cruelties and subjugation.

The furniture maker Senhor Davi Fagundes was the only person he knew who could identify the bark, flowers and branches he gathered. This hollow-eyed man when Charley had asked his usual “Do you speak English?” question had replied, “Yes, a little.”

Charley wrote everything down in his notebooks. There were many species of mahogany, Brazilian rosewood, teak, bloodwood, exotic zebrawood, ipe and cambara woods, anigre and bubinga, cumaru and jatoba, lacewood and makore. And hundreds more without names. He felt fortunate if he could attach a name to one tree each week, draw its general shape, list some of its epiphytes and strangler vines.

“Why you want knowing this?” Fagundes asked.

“To learn the trees that grow in this kind of forest. Where I come from there are no such forests.”

But more and more the cabinetmaker held up his hands and said “Eu não sei!” I don’t know.

At the end of his first year Charley had sent the notebook to Dieter as he would every year until he learned of Conrad. He heard nothing back and wondered if Dieter had abandoned him. In fact, Dieter had abandoned everyone.

Not long after Charley’s departure from Chicago, Dieter, the old pine, had gone down. “Mrs. Garfield,” he said wearily on a Monday noon, “I’m going home early. I have a headache and think I need a night’s sleep.” Mrs. Garfield, who had replaced Miss Heinrich when she retired, clucked and said, “I hope you feel better tomorrow.” But the next morning the headache was bad and he had a stiff neck. By the end of the week he was half-paralyzed, and the doctor diagnosed polio.

“I thought only children got polio,” said Sophia.

“No, no, it can attack at any age. But keep children away from the house. It’s contagious.”

“Hard to breathe,” Dieter whispered. It got harder. By Saturday pneumonia finished him.

• • •

“I don’t care what it takes, we’ve got to find him,” said James Bardawulf, striding to the grimy window and back. “He’s a major heir in the will. The situation is crazy enough. That we don’t know where the hell he is makes it worse. I’m going to get a private detective on it.”

Andrew Harkiss made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You’ve been reading too many books, James Bardawulf. I’m sure Dieter had his address. Have you asked Mrs. Garfield? And isn’t it likely that he gave the address to Mr. Grey when he made his will?” He picked up the telephone and dialed. “Mrs. Garfield, do we have Charley Breitsprecher’s address?”

“Yes sir. It’s in the correspondence file. I’ll get it.”

“Well, good,” said James Bardawulf. “We’ll ask Mr. Grey to send someone from his office with the necessary papers. And I will enclose my personal letter.” He had been composing the letter in his mind for several years and now he would write it.

• • •

The young lawyer, excited by the journey to the tropics (though after seeing dead monkeys in the market he wanted to be back in Chicago), had no trouble finding Charley Breitsprecher, disheveled and rather yellow, in the muddy river town. He told him Dieter had “passed” and handed him the envelope of documents. Charley sent the young man back to his hotel and arranged to meet him for dinner. When he was alone he read the lawyer’s letter, read James Bardawulf’s handwritten page, shook his head, wept and read it again.

James Bardawulf had written:

Dear Charley.

We both have very much to regret and resolve. I am deeply, deeply sorry for attacking you. I have suffered pangs of conscience ever since that night. And Caroline who blames herself for all. But as they say, there is no wind so ill that it does not bring some good. The good is our son Conrad. We love him. Our father, Dieter, taught me that holding on to anger is a great evil. If you return someday to your family in Chicago you will be received with affection.

Your brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher

“None more sorry than I am, James Bardawulf,” said Charley to the letter.

Hours later he read the details of the will and after half a quart of brandy tore a page from his notebook and took up his pen.

“Dear Sir,” he wrote to Mr. Grey. He disclaimed most of his portion of Dieter’s estate, saying, “I would like it to go to my brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher, and his wife, Caroline Breitsprecher, for reasons they know.”

A month later, when Dieter’s will and Charley’s letter were read, James Bardawulf caught his breath. How Charley had changed, down there in the jungle. But then, he, too, had altered.

• • •

In Brazil for the next seven or eight years Charley sent his notebooks not to Dieter but to the boy, Conrad Breitsprecher, often with a letter and a sketch of some comic tropical insect. His malaria attacks increased in ferocity. His fortieth birthday had brought him his mother’s legacy, but he chose to stay in his little house. The work — which he would not leave even for an hour — was everything. Tenacity was in his bone marrow. Yet he dared make only short forays into the forest, for if he went deeper and the malaria laid him low he might be unable to struggle back to his house. Twice the attacks had led to seizures that left him half-dead on the floor.

He came into Senhor Fagundes’s shop clutching a black twig with seven leaves. He was shaking and too ill to speak. He held out the branch to the man who had become something like a friend. The cabinetmaker took the shaking branch, twisted a leaf, looked in his dictionary.

“Leopardwood. Not same like lacewood but look almost — a little.”

Charley swayed, put his hand out to take his twig and dropped to the floor, convulsed. Senhor Fagundes, shocked and afraid, hoping the man did not have a pestilent disease, called the hospital for an ambulance. Charley Duke Breitsprecher, ever a man of contradictions, died a week later of Plasmodium falciparum in Manaós, after writing in his last notebook:

Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it — even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.

The final sentence was his will — a scrawled request that this last notebook be sent to Conrad and all that he possessed, his fortune inherited from Lavinia, and Dieter’s seedling nursery, be held in trust for the boy until he turned twenty-one.

• • •

The early months of the war in Europe did not much affect remote Chicago. As conflict sucked in country after country Americans went about their lives and voted to stay neutral. James Bardawulf and Caroline thought not of war, but of the future, and considered schools for Raphael, Claude and Conrad, handsome boys marked for success.

“This military academy in Indiana,” said James Bardawulf, holding up a paper, “has a high reputation for educating young men of good character. Closer than eastern schools. I say we take a trip to Indiana to look it over.”